Mike Belshe (Twist): “Time is fixed. It’s precious. We all wish we had more of it.” [PODCAST]

I’m always being asked why I got into the web performance business. My standard response is that I got here via the content management systems I used to develop many years ago. We saw that there was a business problem, in that the companies that bought our CMS would then ask us if we could do anything to speed up page rendering, and so we started down the performance path.

But really, I got into this business for the same reason that many people — including you, perhaps — did: because I consider time the most valuable thing we have.

It sounds trite, but so do a lot of true things. As my most recent podcast guest, Mike Belshe, says, “Time is fixed. It’s precious. We all wish we had more of it.”

This attitude is what prompted Mike to create Google’s groundbreaking SPDY protocol, which has the potential to fulfil Google’s stated mandate: make the web universally faster.

And even though Mike left Google a year and a half ago, this attitude remains a driver behind his latest experiment, Twist — an online service that could radically reduce the amount of time you waste waiting for your chronically late friends to show up (or a myriad of other waiting-game scenarios). I’ve tried it, and it actually is kind of miraculous how well it works.

In this podcast, Mike and I had a far-reaching discussion about time, SPDY, Twist, mobile, native apps, and HTML5 versus Java. I enjoyed it immensely. I hope you do, too.